Archive for November 10th, 2011

In his film, Mourad Ben Cheikh interviews a number of courageous activists, lawyers, journalists and bloggers who refused to yield to the terror. He juxtaposes the interviews with footage of the heady days of January when Tunisians took to the streets to demand the resignation of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and his government, and the last televised speeches of the president before he fled the country he’d ruled with an iron fist for over two decades.

Renowned Tunisian human rights lawyer Radhia Nasraoui, who defends victims of torture, tells the filmmaker how she would always check that her brakes had not been tampered with when she got into her car. She is defiant as she recalls how she refused to give into intimidation the day her office was broken into and all her files stolen, and how she danced the night away at a wedding, fully aware that the police were watching her.

Pozible is a crowdfunding platform and community for creative projects and ideas. Developed for artists, musicians, filmmakers, journalists, designers, entrepreneurs, inventors, event organisers, software developers and all creative minded people to help make great things possible. Inspired by crowdsourcing, crowdfunding describes the collective cooperation, attention and trust by people who network and pool their money together, usually via the Internet, in order to support efforts initiated by other people or organisations.

We offer creative individuals, groups and organisations the opportunity to raise funds through pre-selling tangible and intangible rewards by posting a project on the pozible.com. Each project has a funding goal and a time limit (from 1 – 90 days) set by the project creator. During this time the project creator spreads the word about the idea to their fans, friends, family, strangers and sponsors. Supporters simply register and help fund the project.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has generated a slew of questions from those outside the occupying ranks: Who are these people? What do they really want? Which city will be next? How will our public officials respond? And as the protests have stretched well into their second month, when will it all end? These questions represent an understandable attempt to make sense of a complex, diffuse and divisive movement. They attempt to explain what is happening. But they aren’t the questions we really need to ask. Instead, we should be asking why it is happening. And more importantly, we should be asking what we can learn it.

The Occupy Wall Street movement can be a catalyst for change. But only if we ask the right questions. As of now, next steps for the movement are unclear. Perhaps winter will cause the occupiers to decamp. Or perhaps conditions and fraying nerves will lead to a very violent, very bad denouement. Or perhaps the movement will continue to grow and spread, as it has over these past weeks, to more cities and more people. In any case, the challenge for business is to dig deeper into the roots of the protest and to respond thoughtfully, rewriting our own rules before they are rewritten for us.

The eurozone, like the rest of the world economy, is a complex networked system. That gives it properties economists rarely consider but which could help us understand the current crisis.

Complex networks have many interconnected components which influence each other’s behaviour. These changes then feed back on each other. A famous example is the numbers of predators and prey in a given environment, which vary in a complex interdependent way. The eurozone – the 17 countries that share a common currency, the euro – is similarly interdependent, with similar feedback mechanisms.

All complex networks are governed by a balance between negative feedback, such as interest rates, which is stabilising, and positive feedback, such as the self-reinforcing erosion of trust in markets, which is destabilising, says physicist Len Fisher at the University of Bristol.

Looking for advice on how to run a successful crowdfunding campaign? This article lays out some of the most important considerations you’ll need to take into account if you want to build your crowd, get them engaged, and drive them to a rewarding conclusion.

dSo first things first: you’ve got to have a crowd to crowdfund something. Who are you going to reach out to with your pitch? How do you know if they’ll care about what you’re doing? How will you identify your early adopters, those precious individuals who step up first and get the process rolling? And how much money should you ask for from your community of potential supporters? To answer these questions, you’ll need to:

Define the user group that will benefit from bringing your project into being;

Measure your sphere of influence to get a handle on the power of your crowd for leveraging change;

Determine the scope of your project based on insights about your crowd;